Reading this piece analyzing Karzai's apparently self-defeating -- indubitably, American-mission-threatening -- behavior reminded me of an interaction I once had with him.

The background to the story was a dispute between the Bush Administration, which was interested in pursuing aerial spraying to eradicate the poppy fields supplying the drug trade and the Karzai Administration, which claimed to support the goal of stopping the drug trade but just opposed the idea of aerial spraying.

My theory at the time was that Karzai actually opposed eradication and would have complained regardless of the method. At the time, this reminded me of a scene from a favorite childhood book of mine, Cheaper by the Dozen. In the book, as I remember it, the mother was objecting to the locus of the spanking applied by the father: "Not the seat of pants, dear.  Not there." But when he shifted to apply the spanking elsewhere, he got the same objection: "Not the top of the head, dear. Not there." Exasperated, the father bellowed, "Where can I spank him?"  The reply was classic, "I don't know where, but not there, dear. Not there."

Karzai claimed that was not the case, and when we pressed him for an explanation, he gave one that none of us had anticipated. He said we should do truck-based spraying, not aerial spraying, because that way the Afghan farmers would be able to shoot at the trucks in defense of their fields. As I recall, the conversation went something like this....

"Wouldn't that block the spraying?" 

"Not really. You could shoot back and the trucks would finish the job."

"But why not just do the aerial spraying and be done with it? It is safer and more efficient."

"Because the Afghan people will resent it so much more if they can't shoot back. They won't like losing the crops either way, but they will learn to live with it if they had a chance to shoot back while you were doing it. If you just do it from the air, they will feel powerless and the resentment will grow." 

It was not at all how we thought about the problem and perhaps it was not the real reason anyway. Perhaps Karzai calculated that the risks of ground-spraying would be enough for us to be deterred from proceeding.

But his explanation has always stuck with me, and it has a certain perverse logic to it. It certainly seems to me like Karzai is "taking pot-shots at the trucks," as it were. Maybe there is an Afghan logic to it.

Whatever your perspective about counterinsurgency (COIN), there is one position that is clearly wrong: the view that debate about COIN is not important, necessary, or productive, as retired Army colonel Robert Killebrew recently suggested over at the Best Defense. Beyond advancing the peculiar idea that a contentious issue in American foreign policy merits no further discussion, Killebrew has it exactly backwards: The debate over COIN is at an important turning point, and is in many ways just getting started. Scholars and strategic thinkers are increasingly engaging the ideas of counterinsurgency in new and sophisticated ways. This development should hearten supporters of the intellectual enterprise generally ,as well as those who embrace the notion that better thinking can lead to better policy.

Last week the Robert S. Strauss Center at the University of Texas (UT) sponsored a workshop, Reassessing Counterinsurgency, together with partners from King's College London and the University of Queensland. The workshop brought together scholars and practitioners to tackle the subject of counterinsurgency in critically new ways. It included COIN's most articulate advocates and critics, policy experts, strategic analysts, historians, and political scientists from the U.S., Britain, and beyond who are doing path-breaking new work on the subject. 

At least one thing became clear over a day and a half of refreshingly nuanced discussion.  Despite years of attention in the Beltway, the counterinsurgency debate remains remarkably muddled. Terms are still frustratingly ill-defined. Distinctions between tactical advice and strategic direction are lost in the jumble, as larger disagreements over policy in Iraq and Afghanistan are tangled into the discussion about COIN. Scholars bristle at what they see as the intellectual shallowness and lack of theoretical rigor of counterinsurgency ideas, while policy hands and some military officers have no patience for what they perceive as the academy's tendency to suffer from analysis paralysis. 

The confused mishmash notwithstanding, the UT workshop surfaced a few recurring themes.  As the army is in the midst of revising their counterinsurgency manual, there are at least four key sets of questions that doctrine writers might consider, and that should help shape the scholarly research agenda and the next phase of the debate: 

1. Are We Speaking the Same Language?

If the first step in developing good theory is defining terms, then there is much work still to be done in counterinsurgency. There is a growing consensus that the term itself is ambiguous, misused, and has experienced "conceptual stretching." As one workshop participant has written, "in a remarkably short period of time, counterinsurgency has become the new Kuhnian paradigm, or normal science, for non-kinetic (or limited kinetic) warfare. However it is far from obvious that this framework truly captures the dynamics that are occurring in an increasingly complex and interconnected world."

Is "counterinsurgency" merely one type of what scholar Harry Eckstein referred to as "internal war"? If so, how should we understand its features as compared to other manifestations of internal war, such as civil war and revolutions? Taking one step further back, is war divisible into such classifications, or, instead, as Clausewitz would have it, always a chameleon? This most fundamental conceptual question -- how (or whether) to subdivide conflict analytically and how counterinsurgency fits into a broader typology -- has received surprisingly little attention in the debate over COIN.

There are other important, and largely unanswered, questions. What are the differences between "first-party COIN" -- that conducted by a state within its own territory -- and "third-party COIN" conducted by an intervening outside power? Is there a difference between "big COIN," or large-scale state-building, and the more modest ambitions of "little COIN," focused on small-scale assistance? If these different types of COIN are significantly dissimilar propositions, should they be called the same thing? The gaps in the theoretical and scholarly literature are legion, and they can only be filled by continued research, better evidence, thinking, and yes, debate. 

2. Is Field Manual 3-24 COIN? Is COIN Field Manual 3-24?

These discussions also raise the important question of how to situate the Army's Field Manual (FM) 3-24, published in December 2006, in the broader literature on COIN. In disputes over counterinsurgency, FM 3-24 and COIN are frequently conflated. Yet their precise relationship remains unclear. Did FM 3-24 represent the state of the art in thinking on counterinsurgency, or was it, as some suggest, merely a military doctrinal manual, a small slice of a larger intellectual pie focused on tactical advice to soldiers and the conflict in Iraq?  According to this view, it would be unjust to impugn counterinsurgency more broadly based on perceived deficiencies in the manual, and those who take issue with COIN might best participate in the manual's revision, rather than throw rocks from the sidelines.

Yet if FM 3-24 was just a doctrinal manual, it was also undeniably unique in many ways. It was certainly the first military doctrine to be unveiled with such fanfare, including appearances by the drafting team in various media outlets to herald the manual's arrival. One could be forgiven for seeing a larger enterprise in a University of Chicago edition, which featured an introduction that seems to range far beyond the document's nominal, tactical, remit. FM 3-24 arguably played an important role in the bureaucratic and domestic politics associated with the decision to surge in Iraq, and it seems hard to dispute that various personalities and Washington think tanks linked to the document played a major role in U.S. policy deliberations over both Iraq and Afghanistan. It is a truism that military doctrine is not strategy. But what if, in this case, a doctrine became a strategy, as critics have argued? 

As FM 3-24 is revised, it seems a good moment to have a larger debate about the interactive effects of doctrine and strategy, real or prospective. Is COIN per se the right manual, or should it be written as part of a broader document that addresses other forms of internal conflict? Does the mere existence of a manual inevitably create a "moral hazard" effect, lulling policymakers into a false confidence about what is possible? Might it provide incentives for policymakers and strategists to "name" a conflict according to the manuals that are available, rather than the facts on the ground? To what extent should a doctrinal manual take account of the risk of its misuse? 

3. History and Statecraft

Counterinsurgency also raises critically important questions about the uses of history. The basis of counterinsurgency is a set of particular historical cases, most notably the British in Malaya, the French in Algeria, and the U.S. in Vietnam, and to a lesser extent the British experience in Northern Ireland and imperial policing operations in the U.K.'s former dominions. These cases raise two different, but related questions: 1. What happened?; and 2. How do we use what happened? Despite the rather blithe use of these historical analogies in many discussions about COIN, both of these questions are highly contested by scholars.

While Malaya is widely considered the perfect case study of counterinsurgency principles (at least as articulated in FM 3-24), a new generation of scholars, such as British historian Karl Hack, has begun to challenge popular understandings of what happened there, including the much discussed "hearts and minds" approach. Scholars are also examining the other case studies of COIN in critical ways and developing new, much more nuanced, understandings of those histories.

But the second part of the question is how we use those cases, and this connects to a larger and long-standing debate about the uses of history for policymaking. At Harvard, the late Ernest May and Richard Neustadt spent decades examining the uses of history and warning against the perils of simplistic historical analogies in developing and/or justifying policy.  Francis J. Gavin and James Steinberg recently offered a wise and thoughtful refresher on this subject, reminding us that history's "lessons" can be as often misleading as helpful. 

But this question has received surprisingly little attention in the COIN debate. Despite the certainty with which COIN advocates have offered historical models, it is not at all obvious or well demonstrated that the classic case studies of COIN are applicable to modern American warfare. Imagine that we conducted the very simple exercise, suggested by May and Neustadt, to test the applicability of an historical analogy: Divide a sheet of paper in half, and on the left side write down the similarities between Iraq and, say, Malaya. On the right side, write down the differences. Would the left side really be more robust than the right? And even if the relevance of historical cases seems plausible at first blush, surely the evidentiary burden lies with those who argue for the use of the analogy. In the field of counterinsurgency, there has been surprisingly little deep scholarship that would even begin to meet this burden.

4. What Really Happened in Iraq, and Why? What of COIN in Afghanistan?

Inextricably woven into the previous three sets of questions is the U.S. experience in Iraq during and after the Surge, which, for some, offers the most recent, and most potent, case study in successful COIN. According to this view, COIN, as described by FM 3-24, was taken to Iraq in 2007, implemented there, and violence declined. What better evidence of COIN's utility than our own experience but a few years ago?

But there are serious and unresolved questions about what really happened in Iraq, and both sides of the argument have suffered from an absence of evidence. It has been hard to prove that the Surge (and its alleged accompanying COIN techniques) worked, but also hard to demonstrate that it did not, and both sides have plausible, but unproven, explanations for the observed outcomes. In an upcoming article in International Security, Stephen Biddle, Jeffrey Friedman, and Jacob Shapiro use recently declassified data on violence to explore various competing arguments about the Surge. Without spoiling the surprise, their answer is that the story is complicated, and reveals the limits of several sides of the argument. 

The Iraq question leads us irretrievably to a discussion about how counterinsurgency ideas featured in later policy -- and results -- in Afghanistan. Here there are also important, unanswered questions that scholars must tackle in coming years. Was the problem that COIN was never fully implemented in Afghanistan, as some argue? Or did the U.S. try, and fail, at counterinsurgency there, as others would have it? Beyond the facts on the ground there is also an important, and insufficiently understood, history of how interpretations of the Iraq experience affected the thinking of military and civilian senior leaders in policy on Afghanistan, for good or for ill. 

If indeed COL Killebrew is right that counterinsurgency is here to stay, then so long as we are sending young men and women into danger to undertake such conflicts, it is imperative that we get it right, or as right as we can. We are obligated not to sit back, be quiet, and declare the debate over, but instead work diligently to fill the serious intellectual gaps in this fascinating and critical subject that has had such a profound impact on American policy and real lives on the battlefield.

In truth much as I searched, I have found that the Uncertainty Principle of quantum physics actually has no analogue in foreign policy. Regardless, it is a good way to describe Obama's foreign policy doctrine. Call it the Uncertainty Doctrine.

Businesspeople and economists make a good case that the uncertainty of Obama's domestic policies has slowed the economic recovery. The private sector does not know when and for what they will next be taxed or regulated, what the new health care law visited upon them means for the economy. The anxiety causes a freeze in economic growth.

So too with Obama's uncertainty foreign policy doctrine. Allies and adversaries have no idea what we will do next and are acting accordingly.

Obama announced a troop surge in Afghanistan and then immediately a pull out date. Should our allies stick with us as we take out just enough bad guys to make the Taliban more vengeful when they return? Or instead should Kabul just make deals with the Taliban? An Iranian nuclear weapon is unacceptable but so is Israel removing one from the hands of Iran. Assad must go, but we will not do anything to make that happen. On the other hand maybe its best if he just stayed -- easier to work with than the alternative.

China was a partner in global action problems -- perhaps even a G2 was in the offing! Together we would work on climate change, nonproliferation, who knows what else? Now the United States needs to pivot to Asia to keep China in check.

Here is another part of the uncertainty doctrine that must leave Europeans and Middle Easterners scratching their heads: The United States is pivoting to Asia (under fiscal constraint) but not abandoning its allies in Europe or the Middle East.

The pivot, we tell the Chinese, is not about them. But then Manila and Tokyo ask: "What do you mean the pivot isn't about China. The Chinese are unwelcome visitors into our waters at least once a week!"

Oh, and we have new battle plan called "Air Sea Battle" that again is not about China. However, it is meant to operate in "anti-access" environments -- those in which enemies have many missiles, submarines, and cyber warfare capabilities. Sounds like China. We will be able to operate again in those environments once the plan is executed, but we will not execute it because we are cutting the defense budget, so China should worry a bit but not too much. Our allies should have just a little dose of reassurance to go along with their fears.

India is a strategic partner whom we would like to join us in checking (or not checking?) China but we are going to leave Afghanistan for India to fight over with its archrival Pakistan.

I think the point is made. Just as uncertainty in economic policy can make an economy sputter, so too has Obama's uncertainty doctrine made the world a more dangerous place. With no one else to do the chores, the United States must lead with certainty. The rest of the world may complain about our arrogance, but that is better than complaining about utter chaos.

In my last post, I sketched out the strategic case for significantly deepening U.S.-Kurdish ties. While such a paradigm shift may take some time, a good start can be made simply by clearing out the underbrush of counter-productive policies that needlessly hinder our relations with the Kurds. During this week's visit to Washington by President Masoud Barzani, head of Iraq's Kurdistan regional government, the Obama administration would be well-served by focusing on several practical deliverables:

Stop Treating the Kurds as Terrorists. Incredibly, under existing immigration law, members of Iraq's two main Kurdish parties -- Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Iraqi President Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) -- are classified as terrorists when seeking visas to enter the United States. As modified after 9/11, the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) uses a definition of terrorism so broad that virtually any resistance group that in the past engaged in armed conflict against its government is considered a so-called "Tier III" terrorist organization. Membership in such a group is automatic grounds for denial of admission to the U.S., treatment that extends to the member's family as well.

That's right: The KDP and PUK for years worked hand-in-glove with the United States to bring down the tyrannical regime of Saddam Hussein. After 2003, they served as America's most faithful allies in efforts to stabilize Iraq. And for all their trouble fighting alongside U.S. forces they got . . . well, they got labeled as terrorists, of course. As Mr. Bumble famously says in Oliver Twist, "If the law supposes that . . . [then] the law is an ass -- an idiot."

In 2009, Secretary of State Clinton and Secretary of Homeland Security Napolitano exercised their discretionary authority to exempt members of the KDP and PUK from the INA's terrorism-related inadmissibility grounds on a case-by-case basis -- provided they were able to satisfy officials at State and DHS that they met six criteria meant to show they were not in fact terrorists and posed no danger to U.S. security. Needless to say, the process of qualifying for the exemption is frequently long, cumbersome and -- let's be frank -- humiliating for people who threw their lot in completely with America, and often risked life and limb to help it succeed. And even with the exemption possibility, the slanderous classification of the KDP and PUK as terrorist organizations remains, an undeserving and gratuitous insult to a proud people that have gone out of their way to align themselves openly with Washington -- an all-too-rare occurrence in a Middle East where anti-Americanism is, sad to say, always in fashion.

Small consolation for the Kurds, perhaps, that the African National Congress and Nelson Mandela were also once ensnared by the INA's overly-broad sweep. Thankfully, Congress acted in 2008 to pass a law that explicitly removed the ANC from treatment as a terrorist organization under the INA. Similar legislative relief has been provided to other groups who fought repressive regimes. Now, no less should be done for the Kurds. As has so often been the case when it comes to doing the right thing in matters of national security, Senator Joseph Lieberman is leading the way, crafting a possible fix to the Kurds' outrageous dilemma. The Obama administration is signaling that it will support Lieberman's effort and it should do so, wholeheartedly. A statement to that effect by President Obama when he meets Barzani would go a long way. Even better if the president in the meantime issued a directive to State and DHS instructing them to cease considering the KDP and PUK as terrorist organizations for purposes of issuing visas.

Allow Visas to be Issued From Erbil. A related problem is that the U.S. Consulate in Kurdistan is not yet issuing visas. Instead, Kurds wishing to visit the United States must either take their chances by going to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad (by all accounts, a nightmarish experience due to security precautions), or travel abroad to an American post in the Gulf or Turkey. On top of the hurdles already posed by the INA's restrictions, the additional time, expense, and hassle this process adds can quickly become prohibitive. The Obama administration should act soon to correct the situation, and fast-track a presidential decision to issue visas from Erbil.

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It sure feels like we are on a knife's edge in Afghanistan, but I also know how hard it is to assess such things. And I know what it is like to be wrong. Those were my thoughts as I read the various accounts of the day's developments in Afghanistan, and especially after reading this quote from an unidentified "Western official":

A Western official in Kabul, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer his assessment, said he was hopeful that the anger over the shooting rampage could be overcome. The burning of Korans by U.S. troops on Feb. 20 -- which American officials said was accidental -- unleashed a wave of violent protests and prompted Afghan security forces to open fire on U.S. military trainers, but the fury subsided after a few days.

"Everyone said the burning of the Korans was a turning point," he said. "It came and it went. My best analysis is that everyone saw the abyss, and no one wanted to jump in."

That was eerily reminiscent of what Bush policymakers believed after the Golden Mosque bombing in February 2006. There was an immediate sectarian furor and then, as my former boss put it  in an interview with Bob Schieffer, the Iraqis appeared to step back:

Mr. Hadley: ...So this is a society that has been tested for a while. The interesting point here is what conclusions the communities draw from this difficult week. They've stared into the abyss a bit. And I think they've all concluded that further violence, further tension between the communities is not in their interest. And our hope and our ambassador spoke about this this week that in this tragedy there actually is an opportunity where all the communities will decide that really it is in their mutual interest to avoid the violence, pull together and construct the kind of unity government that can move this country forward.

SCHIEFFER: So you're saying they stared into the abyss. Are you saying this may be in some way bring them together?

Mr. HADLEY: That is the hope. Having seen -- having been tested in this way, having seen what the terrorists are doing and trying to provoke the communities. What was interesting is all the statements from all the leaders was that this tactic would not succeed, that the communities were going to stay together and work together and to try and avoid violence and build a unity government.

As we now know, after abating briefly, the sectarian strife intensified throughout 2006 and within months Iraq was trapped in a vicious, self-sustaining cycle of sectarian violence.  It took the Bush-Petraeus-Crocker surge to break that and put Iraq on a more positive trajectory.

Viewed through the lens of U.S. policy options, Afghanistan may be in a more perilous situation. Obama has already tried a surge; I doubt he could go to that option again even if he wanted to, which he shows no interest in doing.

The alternative that appears to be gaining momentum inside the Administration involves speeding the transition to Afghan control (ironically, precisely what the Baker-Hamilton Commission recommended as the alternative to the Iraq surge back in 2006), and relying on  counter-terrorism operations by U.S. forces to protect core U.S. interests. However, as Steve Biddle points out, that option is based on "unrealistic assumptions."   

Specifically, advocates of this accelerated transition option have somehow convinced themselves that once we hand over the mission to Afghan leaders, we can step back from expensive nation-building while maintaining precision-strike counter-terrorism operations.  But the Afghan leaders hate most those counter-terrorism operations and like most our expensive commitment to nation-building. Why would they be more inclined to allow us to do what they hate when we have curtailed what they most want?

Of course, our national interest in continuing counter-terrorism strike missions will not wane, so the more realistic choice after transition will be this unpalatable set of options: (1) defer to Afghan concerns, at the cost of an ever-enlarging sanctuary for the terrorist network; (2) shift to longer-range counter-terrorism strikes, ones that do not rely on host-nation support. The problems with #1 are obvious. The problems with #2 are that longer-range strikes are also less precise, so they will involve more civilian casualties, thus inflaming Afghan concerns still further. They are also likely to inflame our NATO allies, who are already queasy about the more precise drone-strikes.

We may be at the worst kind of turning point: One where every turn leads to a worse situation.

I largely agree with Peter's recent, insightful post about U.S. grand strategy, except when he says that "Compared to the Cold War period, we have more slack in our security environment."  In this he echoes Kori's earlier contention that "The world is much more conducive to American interests than [during the Cold War]: we are militarily dominant, the threats to us are fewer and less apocalyptic, our allies are more capable to handle their own problems, our enemies less so, and our values on the ascendancy."  This seems to be a fashionable view.  I recently heard an experienced foreign policy wonk claim at an event in D.C. that the United States currently faces "the lowest level of existential threat in U.S. history.

I disagree quite strongly -- not because the Cold War was such a wonderfully safe era, but because ours is more dangerous.  Peter and I have both heard the view from our students that the Cold War was, on hindsight, a time of roses and sunshine, and I think he is right to criticize it.  Our young students confuse simplicity with safety.  It was a simple, dangerous world:  nuclear war was simply terrifying.  I am (just) old enough to have a living memory of the Cold War and the feeling of dread and danger it fostered.  We were still doing duck-and-cover drills when I was in the 3^rd grade.  (Which always made me wonder:  if my 3rd grade desk was nuclear-bomb-proof, why didn't they make the Pentagon out of the same material?)

Peter is right that the Cold War was ridiculously dangerous.  During the Cold War the Soviet Union and China had nuclear and conventional capabilities superior to what North Korea and Iran have today, and the United States lost some 95,000 troops in two bloody wars in Korea and Vietnam.  During the Cold War the United States and Russia competed globally; any local conflict had the potential to escalate into global war in which the American homeland would be directly threatened.  This was without doubt a dangerous era. 

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President Obama is apparently going to announce the extent and pace of the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan this week. His decision, in December 2009, to begin the withdrawal in July 2011 was never a good idea because it gave the Taliban the incentive to simply wait us out and accelerate the U.S. public's war fatigue. The best Obama can do now is mitigate the damage by highlighting our hard-won progress of the last two years and telling the American people that stability in Afghanistan is both important and possible, that it will take patience, and that our withdrawal will be measured, slow, and not come at the risk of defeat.

We'll see how Obama measures up to this. Meanwhile, an equally interesting question is, how do the Republican presidential candidates measure up? With the exception of Mitt Romney, not very well.

Leading neoconservative Republicans criticized front-runner Mitt Romney for his statement on Afghanistan during the Republican presidential debate last week. But I think his comment was actually one of the better statements on Afghanistan, compared with the others we've heard recently. Here's what he actually said: "It's time for us to bring our troops home as soon as we possibly can, consistent with the word that comes to our generals that we can hand the country over to the [Afghan] military in a way that they're able to defend themselves ... I think we've learned some important lessons in our experience in Afghanistan. I want those troops to come home based upon not politics, not based upon economics, but instead based upon the conditions on the ground determined by the generals. But I also think we've learned that our troops shouldn't go off and try and fight a war of independence for another nation. Only the Afghanis [sic] can win Afghanistan's independence from the Taliban."

In other words, we should 1) heed the military's professional judgment, 2) withdraw based on conditions on the ground, and 3) resist withdrawing just to save a buck, and 4) demand more accountability from the Afghans. That's actually pretty good.

By contrast, Newt Gingrich did not directly address the issue of how many troops should be withdrawn, but he did say regarding foreign policy that "the price tag is always a factor." That's true in a trite and uninteresting sense: You don't want to bankrupt yourself unless your very survival is at stake. But Afghanistan is not bankrupting the U.S. Treasury. Much has been made about the price tag of the Afghanistan war, but the reality is that $100 billion per year is peanuts compared with what Iraq cost at its height and less than peanuts compared with the trillions we spend on entitlements and the broader defense budget. Gingrich seemed to imply that we can't afford the Afghanistan war: No one has yet explained how we can afford the consequences of rapid withdrawal.

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Fellow FP blogger David Rothkopf criticizes outgoing Defense Secretary Bob gates for daring to notice progress in Afghanistan. Rothkopf doubts that reconciliation with the Taliban is truly possible or that political progress "would actually ultimately make Afghanistan any more stable or any less likely to become a haven for terrorist groups." He argues that the 2014 deadline has eroded our leverage in negotiations with the Taliban and undermined our influence in post-war Afghanistan. Most incredibly, he believes that "ten years of waging this war have been so unfruitful" that any further effort is futile.

Rothkopf is right about the 2014 deadline and wrong about everything else. Take his assertion that a political deal with the Taliban has no prospect of improving stability in Afghanistan or denying safe haven to al-Qaeda. This seems to me a completely unfounded assertion. Post-war Afghanistan is not going to be a particularly pleasant place to live, but a post-war Afghanistan created by a negotiated settlement with most insurgents on terms favorable to us will almost certainly be a more pleasant, and safer, place than Afghanistan circa 2001 and one in which we will retain the ability to protect our interests in South Asia.

Rothkopf elides the difference between a sup-optimal outcome and complete failure. It is as if our failure to achieve perfection means that we should give up completely. Since we admittedly bungled the job for the first five or six years, paid an irreparable opportunity cost, and can no longer hope to achieve in Afghanistan what we could have if we had put out a good faith effort from the very beginning, we should, according to Rothkopf, call it quits.

This is nonsense. Rothkopf is letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Perfection is out of our grasp, but we can still achieve better-than-awful. We won't get an A, but we might pull out a C, which is better than the F we'll get if we pull out too quickly. Notably Rothkopf does not describe what is likely to happen following a rapid American withdrawal (civil war, instability in Pakistan), the costs associated with those consequences, or how we should deal with that scenario. He can't, because all of those considerations prove that Rothkopf's prescription is worse than the disease.

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According to the New York Times, Pakistan has demanded that the United States halt drone strikes on Pakistani territory and draw down the number of CIA and Special Forces personnel in the country. The move is in response to the United States' insistence that Pakistan release American contractor Raymond Davis, who had been arrested on charges of murder. If true, and if Pakistan holds fast to its demands, the move could represent a watershed in U.S.-Pakistani relations.

Since 2001 U.S. relations with Pakistan have been premised on the idea that Pakistan shares U.S. interests in South Asia and is willing and able to cooperate with us. The first idea -- that we share interests -- is patently wrong. The second is increasingly doubtful. What then? What should U.S. policy towards Pakistan be?

For 60 years Pakistan has defined its national interest as the ability to compete with India, retain its hold on part of Kashmir, and advance its standing in the Muslim world. To that end it fought three wars (four if you count the Kargil conflict in 1999) with India since 1947, sought hegemony over Afghanistan as "strategic depth," developed nuclear weapons, and supported a range of militants as proxies against Afghanistan and India. None of this is in America's interest.

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"Pakistan is said to pursue a foothold in Afghanistan," reads today's headline. Breaking news? Old news, rather.

Nonetheless, the New York Times has done its readers a service by laying out clearly the danger the Pakistani military's intentions pose to the project of democratic state-building and security in Afghanistan. It has also reminded us, yet again, how President Obama's July 2011 date for the start of a U.S. troop drawdown has created a perverse incentive structure that encourages both the Afghan and Pakistani governments to hedge against the United States in this vital region. No matter how talented General David Petraeus proves to be commanding American and NATO forces, it is hard to see how our Afghan strategy can be successful absent a strategic reorientation by the Obama administration that creates a different calculus for leaders in Kabul and Rawalpindi (headquarters of the Pakistani armed forces) with regard to the Afghan endgame.

Pakistan's military intelligence establishment continues to define national security with reference to the weakness and pliability, rather than the strength, of its Afghan neighbor. There is both an external and an internal logic to this construction of national security.

Externally, Pakistan seeks "strategic depth" against India, whose influence and friendly relations with the government of President Hamid Karzai threaten the Pakistani nightmare of strategic encirclement. Moreover, the Pakistani security establishment's sponsorship of the Haqqani network and Lashkar-e-Taiba is today what Pakistan's sponsorship of Kashmiri militants was in the 1980s and 1990s -- a strategic tool to target and weaken India through terrorist attacks while enabling Rawalpindi to claim plausible deniability. At the same time, Pakistan's close relationship with the forces of Sirajuddin Haqqani (an important al Qaeda ally) and the Afghan Taliban give it critical leverage in its dealings with Washington.  

Despite the billions of dollars of assistance the United States provides its South Asian ally, many members of Pakistan's strategic elite believe that, as a result of the influence Rawalpindi derives from its friendship with our enemies, the United States needs Pakistan more than Pakistan needs the United States. In this view, if Pakistan severed its close links to selected militants, closed down their sanctuaries in Pakistan's tribal regions, and fully endorsed the Western project in Afghanistan, Pakistani leaders might no longer enjoy the red-carpet treatment from Washington. Pakistan therefore derives strength in its dealings with America by pursuing differentiated strategic objectives rather than similar ones. This is a different conception of the notion of "ally" than applies to American relations with other key partners.

This reality, in turn, leads to the internal logic of Pakistani statecraft in Afghanistan. The military intelligence establishment's position at the core of Pakistani society and politics has been strengthened, not weakened, by Western intervention in Afghanistan over the past nine years (though the opposite would have been true had the West and our Afghan partners succeeded in building a functioning and accountable Afghan state that highlighted Pakistan's own political deficiencies). The war against al Qaeda and the Taliban made General Pervez Musharraf's military dictatorship appear indispensable to the United States. Following Pakistan's democratic transition (which Washington supported, though not soon enough) and the subsequent U.S. presidential succession, Obama forged a new Afghan strategy that has increasingly come to rely on Pakistan to deliver the Afghan Taliban (and perhaps also the militant networks run by Siraj Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar) for an Afghan political settlement that would give these forces -- each currently allied in various ways with al Qaeda -- positions of power in a new Afghan constitutional settlement so that Western forces could come home.

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In a conversation about Kazakhstan's backsliding on democratic reforms, this story over at the Cable relates that President Obama downplayed any pressure by telling Kazakhstan's President Nazarbayev that the United States is still "working" on its own democracy. And in a rather clumsy effort to walk back from the obvious implication of moral equivalency between the Kazakh and American systems, NSC Senior Director Mike McFaul (who himself has a long-standing commitment to democracy promotion) pointed not to the strength of America's national principles but to, well, his own boss: "[Obama's] taken, I think, rather historic steps to improve our own democracy since coming to office here in the United States." 

The problem with these Obama Administration statements is not that they are technically false. Virtually every American would concede that, measured against a Platonic ideal, the American democratic system will always have areas for improvement. And virtually every American would also see President Obama's election as a historic achievement in light of America's troubled racial past.

The problem with President Obama's reported statements is rather than, in context, they are untrue and unhelpful. There are several reasons why:

• They are inaccurate. By any objective standard, American democracy is immeasurably more free, more vibrant, more healthy, and more democratic than the Kazakh autocracy.

• They are counterproductive. Despite its own democratic backsliding, Kazakhstan this year holds the chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), an organization with a robust democratic charter and a notable track record of supporting democratic institutions. The Nazarbayev regime pushed for years to get the chairmanship to burnish its own legitimacy, not to advance OSCE principles. If President Obama's intention was to get Kazakshtan to uphold its OSCE commitments, his words will backfire by instead sending the message to Nazarbayev that the U.S. isn't serious about pressing for significant reform. Kazakhstan's OSCE chairmanship had already been delayed by one year to allow time for Kazakhstan to make specific improvements in its own record. But given that Nazarbayev took few if any such steps -- and if anything the situation worsened with a widely-condemned internet regulation bill -- Kazakhstan seemed to be trying to call the OSCE's bluff. This latest message from the Obama administration will only further reinforce Nazarbayev's intransigence.

• They are demoralizing. Besides Nazarbayev himself, Obama's most important audience is the beleaguered Kazakh human rights and democracy activists, who need bold and unequivocal expressions of support from the most powerful and most free nation in the world -- not hand-wringing and moral equivalency. The Kazakh government didn't miss this opportunity to exploit the meeting. One can almost hear the smugness in the Kazakh Ambassador's voice from this Wall Street Journal story:

• Erlan Idrissov, Kazakstan's ambassador to the U.S., said in an interview that Mr. Obama offered Mr. Nazarbayev the Winston Churchill quote on democracy being "the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." "There was no pressure at all in the meeting," the ambassador said."

• They undermine American interests in a strategic region. Events this past week in Kyrgyzstan only further show how tumultuous yet important Central Asia is, whether for energy supplies, military basing, counterterrorism cooperation, or any number of other issues. Russia and China are playing their own new version of the "Great Game" for influence. The United States will not succeed by imitating them in downplaying values, but rather by offering a distinct alternative model to the region of transparency, accountability, and rule of law. This approach does not unrealistically preclude cooperation with unsavory autocracies; it rather makes clear that engagement is not just with governing rulers but with their citizens and societies as well.

• They undercut multilateralism. Kazakhstan's chairmanship threatens to erode the OSCE's historic effectiveness and credibility. If a hallmark of the Obama administration's foreign policy is strengthening multilateralism and international partnership, these statements don't help. Downplaying Kazakhstan's autocracy also diminishes the OSCE.

• They reinforce the narrative of President Obama as too willing to apologize for America's alleged misdeeds and imperfections, but not willing enough to defend American values. If this were an isolated incident, it might have drawn less attention. But it comes against the backdrop of a series of similar Presidential statements over the past year, and plays into a worrisome narrative of a President more impressed with himself than with the nation he leads.

President Obama addressed some of these last concerns admirably and forcefully in his Oslo speech last year. But with this latest missed opportunity with Kazakhstan, one worries that old habits might be returning.

By Daniel Blumenthal

An end of the year meeting between Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Japanese Ambassador Ichiro Fujisaki exemplifies all that is wrong with Obama's Asia policy. In a matter of weeks, China blew up the Copenhagen climate change talks and humiliated President Obama, executed a mentally ill Brit on drug possession charges, and sentenced Liu Xiabo, the human rights activist and political reformer to 11 years in prison.

And what does the Administration do? Call in the Japanese ambassador to, as the Washington Post put it, tell him in "blunt, if diplomatic, terms that the United States remains adamant about moving a Marine base from one part of Okinawa to another."  

Are we really willing to wreck one of our most successful alliances over a real estate dispute? Meanwhile, as Washington hyperventilates about Japan's coming entente with China, Prime Minister Hatayoma just concluded a successful visit to India. A deeper Tokyo-Delhi security cooperation pact is not exactly a kowtow to China.

The "kick Japan kiss China approach" is indicative of a larger Obama problem: the inability to distinguish friends from rivals. The administration has frozen sales to Taiwan. Reports out of India indicate that the Obama administration "has signaled its intent to abandon elements in its ties with New Delhi that could rile China, including a joint military drill in Arunachal and any further Indo-U.S. naval maneuvers involving Japan or more parties like Australia."  

Despite stiffing Obama on issues from human rights (he was supposed to be more effective than his predecessors with his quiet diplomacy -- that was the justification for dissing the Dalai Lama), Iran, and climate change, China not only gets a pass, but sits back and grins as Washington undercuts its friends.

As the New Year approaches, it is high time for a review of Asia policy. I suggest beginning with a simple set of questions: why has not a single weapons system been sold to Taiwan, why are we escalating a real estate dispute with Japan to ruinous levels, why is our free trade agreement with South Korea still frozen, and why are we rolling back our cooperation with India? If we are sacrificing pro-ally initiatives for the sake of better relations with China it is not working.

David Gray-Pool/Getty Images

By Peter Feaver

With America's newspaper running a huge story on the casket ceremony at Dover, and with NATO allies struggling with the mounting human toll in Afghanistan, it is appropriate to return to the issue of how casualties affect public support for continuing the war. As it happens, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates addressed this very issue himself in a wide-ranging interview published over the weekend in the LA Times.

Gates's thesis is largely correct. According to the LA Times:

Gates said that Americans would have the patience to continue the war in Afghanistan only if the new military approach began to move the conflict out of deadlock. 'If we can show progress, and we are headed in the right direction, and we are not in a stalemate where we are taking significant casualties, then you can put more time on the Washington clock,' he said."

This is an adequate bumper-sticker summary of the argument that my colleagues and I developed, although a more complete summary would note that public prospective expectations of success interact with their retrospective judgments about the rightness or wrongness of the war. In the Afghanistan case, both are in play -- surprisingly so since there is no WMD-intelligence-failure to undermine the rationale for the Afghan war. Yet Gates is right to emphasize the prospective judgment about success because that is the one that is most in jeopardy and, I would argue, most affected by prevailing elite debates.

So how can the Obama team shore up public support for Afghanistan? First and foremost, they have to develop a strategy that will, in fact, lead to success. Facts on the ground matter and no amount of lipstick can beautify a pig. The Obama team is still feeling its way in Afghanistan but the combo of Gates-Petraeus-McChrystal does inspire confidence that they will adjust the strategy as needed to maximize the chance for success, provided that they have the support of the President. Essentially this same team (plus General Odierno and Ambassador Crocker) did just that in Iraq in 2007. Back then they had the unqualified support of the President -- they were, after all, implementing the new strategy he had developed and chosen -- and they refined the "surge" strategy as needed to produce remarkable results on the ground. Something like that is necessary in Afghanistan now.

Necessary, but not sufficient because such changes may take time and the public must be persuaded to hang in there while the strategy plays itself out. For this piece, presidential rhetorical leadership matters and a persuasive account to the public on the strategy and how to evaluate its effectiveness in light of unfolding events is essential. In short, the Obama team must develop credible measures of effectiveness and articulate them. The Obama team has already indicated that they are trying to identify such measures, seeking to avoid the measures that the media sensationalize -- attack numbers and kill numbers -- and focusing instead on indicators related to local governance and economic development.

As it happens, the Bush Administration wrestled with just this sort of problem. In the declassified explanation of the pre-surge Iraq strategy released in November 2005, the Administration sought to identify for the American public how to evaluate the progress (or lack thereof) of what was dubbed the "stand-up/stand-down" strategy:

We track numerous indicators to map the progress of our strategy and change our tactics whenever necessary. Detailed reports - both classified and unclassified - are issued weekly, monthly, and quarterly by relevant agencies and military units.

• Many of these reports with detailed metrics are released to the public, and are readily accessible. For example:
  • Gains in training Iraqi security forces are updated weekly at www.mnstci.iraq.centcom.mil;
  • Improvements in the economy and infrastructure are collected weekly by the State Department (www.state.gov/p/nea/rls/rpt/iraqstatus/) as well as USAID, which continually updates its many ongoing programs and initiatives in Iraq (www.usaid.gov/iraq);
  • Extensive reports are also made every three months to Congress, and are accessible at the State (www.state.gov/p/nea/rls/rpt/2207/) and Defense (www.defenselink.mil/pubs/) Department websites.
  • Americans can read and assess these reports to get a better sense of what is being done in Iraq and the progress being made on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

• Some of the most important metrics we track are:
  • Political: The political benchmarks set forth in U.N. Security Council Resolution 1546 and the Transitional Administrative Law; the number of Iraqis from all areas willing to participate in the political process as evidenced by voter registration and turnout.
  • Security: The quantity and quality of Iraqi units; the number of actionable intelligence tips received from Iraqis; the percentage of operations conducted by Iraqis alone or with minor Coalition assistance; the number of car bombs intercepted and defused; offensive operations conducted by Iraqi and Coalition forces; and the number of contacts initiated by Coalition forces, as opposed to the enemy.
  • Economic: GDP; per capita GDP; inflation; electricity generated and delivered; barrels of oil produced and exported; and numbers of businesses opened.

• Other indicators are also important to success, but less subject to precise measurement, such as the extent to which principles of transparency, trust in government institutions, and acceptance of the rule of law are taking hold amongst a population that has never known them.

• These indicators have more strategic significance than the metrics that the terrorists and insurgents want the world to use as a measure of progress or failure: number of bombings."

Such efforts at public persuasion can have an effect. In the academic study I did with my Duke colleagues, we discovered that the measures of effectiveness that the public identified as the ones they watched to see if the Iraq war was leading to success or failure were essentially the very same ones that the Bush Administration emphasized in its own rhetoric. In my judgment, this was so for two reasons: (1) the Bush Administration rhetoric on this issue was reasonable -- the measures of effectiveness the Administration was emphasizing were plausible and grounded in a reasonable "theory of the case" and so persuasive to a rational public; and (2) the Bush Administration devoted extraordinary amounts of presidential capital, especially time and focus, on the Iraq war.

I am reasonably confident that the Obama team will develop a similarly well-grounded "theory of the case" in Afghanistan. And I am very confident that this team has the rhetorical chops to persuade the American people, should they devote the effort to doing so. I am less confident that they will devote that effort because they have launched so many other initiatives requiring equal-or-greater expenditures of presidential capital.

A last word: the Obama team needs to minimize self-inflicted wounds of the Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot sort. The public will not believe the Obama team is on a successful trajectory if they themselves indicate they are more preoccupied by short-term politics of the matter than the substance. Such a perception is harmful and unnecessary. The truth is that President Obama is a war-time commander-in-chief and, like all war-time commanders-in-chief, his political fortunes will rise or fall with success in the war. Ultimately, focusing on getting national security right is both good policy and good politics.

U.S. Department of Defense/The National Security Archive via Getty Images